Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mechanical translation apparatus and method for translating one original language into another language.
In conventional translation, users or professional translators use a mechanical or machine translation apparatus to mostly translate a foreign language into a language of its own country. However, general users, not only professional translators; have recently had many chances of translations because of recent circulation of personal computers and communication apparatus and development of the Internet.
In many cases, general users desire to understand the meanings of foreign language information which they read from time to time, and they necessarily happen to use a machine translation apparatus.
However, with the current level of language processing techniques of a machine translation apparatus, it is impossible to perfectly translate all sentences and many machine translation apparatus output sentences containing errors. If a translated language contains errors, a user is forced to read again the original language. Long time and much labor are required for a user to read an original language after reading the translated language, particularly between an original English language and a translated Japanese language whose word order are very different.
For example, a conventional translation apparatus translates an English sentence:
xe2x80x9cThe newest information on device drivers and how to get installation manual from the author are explained in this section.xe2x80x9d into a Japanese sentence:
xe2x80x9cxe2x80x9d.
In this example, since the original sentence is not correctly translated, it is difficult for a user to understand the meanings of the translated sentence. In this case, since the word orders of the original and translated sentences are different, it takes time and labor to compare both the sentences and the user is forced to read again the original sentence to the end.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a mechanical translation apparatus and method capable of quickly outputting a translation excellent in readability.
A mechanical translation method of this invention comprises: a first step of dividing an input original sentence into a plurality of word trains in accordance with a predetermined division rule; a second step of converting the original sentence into a translated sentence for each divided word train; and a third step of displaying the original sentence and the translated sentence in one-to-one word train correspondence.
A mechanical translation apparatus of this invention comprises: input means for inputting an original sentence and entering various instructions; storage means for storing the original sentence input from the input means; division means for dividing the original sentence in accordance with a predetermined division rule; translation means for converting the original sentence into a translated sentence in the division unit; correspondence sentence generating means for generating a corresponding pair of the original sentence and the translated sentence and storing the two sentences in the storage means; and display means for displaying the original sentence and the translated sentence in one-to-one word train correspondence.
In this invention, a phrase division unit divides an original sentence in a translation unit of phrase, and the original sentence and a translated sentence are displayed as a pair on a display device after partition symbols are inserted into the two sentences so as to make easy to understand a correspondence between the two sentences.